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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it, but when you go with bargain basement hosting, you're often going to get bargain basement quality.

I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of shared hosting providers, but personally I've had one just completely disappear, taking my 2 years of prepaid hosting with them (along with hundreds of other customers, at least).

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A few months ago, I was told by Rackspace that "We're not responsible for looking after your hardware" after they'd removed, and destroyed, a working hard drive from a dedicated server instead of replacing the disk that had failed, regardless of the price, all hosting is 'bargain basement quality', some are just more bargin than others =)

Isn't "looking after your hardware" exactly what they're responsible for? Why else are they being paid?

I know that rackspace isn't responsible for data loss caused by hardware failure or an accident on their part. A number of rackspace employees have told me (on irc) that I'm responsible for my own backups. Perhaps it was a misquote?

"We're sorry for the issues you've had with your server today, but we're not responsible for looking after your hardware."

A drive failed in a RAID1 array so I contacted their support to get broken the drive replaced, they removed the working drive and destoryed it then insisted it wasn't their fault, I even gave them the serial number of the failed drive before they removed it. I do have my own offsite backups of everything, but it was still annoying to have to restore the entire server

Although RackSpace is expensive I have never had anything but great support from them. I recommend you escalate your issue as this extremely out of line for them.

I have to agree on some counts. I see a lot of people get burned by companies every year or so - often when they sell and change owners - and then jump ship to just another random more-or-less anonymous webhost.

It's not so much about price as about legal status and especially that it's not a 1-man band operating a server out of their College dormroom - or residential internet. If you've a 50-man company hosting you, it's going to be more reliable in my opinion that if there's only 1 or 2 guys behind it.

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